MY STORY (THE PART I CAN GIVE YOU)

1. THE BEGINNING, WHICH IS BORING

I grew up in Nebraska. My father worked for the railroad and did not talk, which turned out to be excellent training. I enlisted in 1997 at a recruiting office in a strip mall that is now a vape store. I have gone and looked at it.

Basic at Fort Benning. Infantry. I was not the fastest and I was not the strongest and I have never once claimed to be. What I was, was extremely calm, and it took the Army about four years to figure out that this is a rarer thing than being fast.

2. 2003 – 2004

Deployed. I am allowed to say that. There are eleven thousand men who can say the same sentence and most of them have a plaque about it.

What happened at the end of that rotation is that a man I had never met before flew in, watched me for two days without saying anything to me, and then asked me exactly one question. I answered it honestly. He said "okay" and left. Six weeks later my orders changed.

The orders said REASSIGNED. That word is doing a tremendous amount of work.

3. THE PART I CANNOT GIVE YOU

From that point forward I was not, on paper, employed by the United States Army. I was carried by an organization whose name is three letters long, and I was loaned out to a command whose name is five. I am not going to type either one of them. I have gotten in trouble for less.

The arrangement was explained to me one time, in a room, by a man in a golf shirt. The arrangement was this: if it went well, nobody would know. If it went badly and I was taken, there was no phone anywhere on earth that was going to ring on my behalf. There is a word for that arrangement. It starts with a D. I am not going to type that one either, but I would encourage you to sit with it for a second.

I said yes in under four seconds. Sherri has never forgiven the four seconds.

4. WHAT MY MOTHER WAS TOLD

In the spring of 2004 a chaplain and a captain drove out to my mother's house in Grand Island. My mother made them coffee, because that is who she is, and then they told her something, and then she did not make coffee again for about a year.

She was given a folded flag. It is a triangle in a wooden case and it sits on her mantel to this day because she will not take it down and I have stopped asking. There was a service. Forty-one people came. My cousin Denise read a poem she wrote herself, and I have read that poem, and Denise, it is good, but it is long.

They advised the family against opening the casket. The family took that advice.

Four years later I walked up her driveway.

I am not going to write down what she said. That belongs to her.

5. COMING BACK

Some practical notes on being gone for a while:

• My truck had been sold. To a man named GARY OLMSTED, who was very nice about it.
• Somebody else was living in my apartment in Fayetteville and had painted the kitchen a color I would not have chosen.
• My bank account had been closed and distributed. Getting it re-opened took nineteen months and a lawyer.
• My driver's license had to be re-issued from scratch. The woman at the DMV asked me for a birth certificate and I asked her what she thought I had been doing for four years and she said "sir."
• Sherri had remarried.

She un-remarried. I want to be clear that this was her idea and that Doug was, by every account including mine, a good man about the whole thing. Doug if you are reading this, and I have been told you do read this, I meant what I said at the diner.

People ask me how we are. We are fine.

That is where the book gets its title. It is not a happy title. It is the word you hand people when the real answer would take four hours and they have to get back to work.

6. THE NUMBER

I am going to address this one time and then I am going to stop.

There is a phrase people want me to use. I do not use it. I would ask that you do not use it in my guestbook either, because I have to go in and take those out by hand and it takes an evening.

There is a figure. I know what it is. I did not choose it, I did not celebrate it, and I did not write it down at the time, which means the only two places it exists are a filing cabinet I will never see again and my own head at about four in the morning.

It is not two hundred. I have never said two hundred. If somebody has told you that they heard me say two hundred at a sporting goods store in Council Bluffs in the spring of 2019, they were standing too far away to hear me correctly, because what I actually said was that it was more than that.

Do not e-mail me about this. I mean it.

7. WHY I TALK ABOUT IT AT ALL

Fair question. I have been asked it by people who meant it kindly and by people who did not.

Here is my answer. For four years I was a blank space in a filing cabinet, and the only proof I had ever been alive at all was a triangle of fabric on my mother's mantel. A man can only be nothing for so long before he starts to want a receipt.

This website is my receipt. It is not much of one. It is the only one they let me have.

► SEE MY SERVICE RECORD (WHAT IS LEFT OF IT) ◄